Interdisciplinarity and Epistemic Fluency: What makes complex knowledge work possible

This small deck of slides comes from the EATEL webinar “Interdisciplinarity in Technology-Enhanced Learning”. It was conducted as as dialog between Lina Markauskaite and Carolyn Rosé, December 12th, 2018.

This presentation, entitled “Interdisciplinarity and epistemic fluency: What makes complex knowledge work possible”, draws on the notions of “epistemic infrastructures” and “epistemic games”. It argues that each research field needs to build its own epistemic infrastructure for doing joint knowledge work. Constructing shared epsitemic infrastructures is particularly important (and challenging) for interdisciplinary fields, such as TEL. In order to do this, the field needs to understand much better how researchers (and practitioners) do joint knowledge work and then build deliberatively robust socio-technical epistemic infrastructures that enable to work across disciplinary boundaries productively.

Abstract

The topic chosen for the second edition of the Webinar series is “Interdisciplinarity in TEL”. The TEL field is interdisciplinary by definition. This makes TEL an especially interesting research field. Yet, it also brings complexity at different levels. A challenge for TEL researchers is to properly understand what is interdisciplinarity in our field, its challenges and implications. In the first part of the dialog, Lina Markauskaite will elaborate on the concept of epistemic fluency as “the capacity to understand, switch between and combine different kinds of knowledge and different ways of knowing about the world” (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2016). Carolyn Rosé will talk about the history of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era, why it was important to her to work towards that as the personal objective of her past presidency in ISLS. She will also talk about interdisciplinarity in her own research bringing learning sciences, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence together. The second part of the dialog will consist of a ‘questions & answers debate’ by the two speakers, with participation of the audience.

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This site has been created as a home for resources and discussion on the topic of Epistemic Fluency (Read more).

Epistemic Fluency

"Working on real-world problems usually requires the combination of different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge, as well as different ways of knowing. People who are flexible and adept with respect to different ways of knowing about the world can be said to possess epistemic fluency." (Read more in Chapter 1 of Epistemic fluency book)